GRAM - Basic Job Submission and Control Service

GRAM is a uniform service interface for remote job submission and control. It includes the ability to stage files (entire directory trees of files if necessary) into and out of a compute resource prior to and after job execution, remote I/O redirection, job status monitoring, and job signaling (stop, restart, kill, etc.). GRAM also supports features for reliabile job execution including two-stage commits and grid credential refreshing for long-running jobs. GRAM supports basic Grid security mechanisms and can map from Grid-wide identities to local accounts for accounting purposes. Two versions of the GRAM service are available: one that uses Web services interfaces and one that pre-dates the use of Web services in Grids.

It is important to understand that GRAM is not a scheduler. There is no scheduling or metascheduling/brokering. GRAM is often used a front-end to schedulers (allowing Grid systems to submit jobs to the local schedulers). It can also be used to simplify the development of metaschedulers and brokers by providing a uniform interface to many heterogeneous compute resources that otherwise would require the metascheduler to support many submission interfaces.